This is another revision of an earlier review I made. This time, however, my opinion of the movie was greatly changed on my rewatch. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a television movie from HBO, is based on Dee Brown’s famous history of the fall of the American Indians in the latter half of the 19th Century. Brown’s book is too widely focused to make a single movie, so HBO limited itself to the story of the Sioux, from their last great victory at Little Bighorn to the fallout of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, charting their decline from a proud warrior people on the western plains to dependents on a reservation. Overall it’s a pretty accurate film, but accuracy does not always translate into a great movie.
The movie tries for a balanced account of events, though both of the primary protagonists are Sioux Indians. The first is Charles Eastman (Adam Beach). Eastman is the biggest inaccuracy of the movie. As in real life he has a Sioux father who converted to Christianity and changed his name to Jacob Eastman. For a while Charles, as Ohiyesa, lived with his mother’s people, but they were not part of the group under Sitting Bull, so Eastman’s presence at Little Bighorn is completely fictional. He was put in a mission school before having an American education program. Though the movie doesn't have him go to one of the controversial boarding schools, it still shows how Indian children were made to abandon their cultural heritage, down to adopting western names. The movie gets inaccurate with Eastman again, however, in giving him a close relationship with Henry Dawes which didn't exist, and also making him figure more in the other Sioux's lives earlier in the timeline.
What is true is that he was the first American Indian to master western medicine and became a doctor on the Great Sioux Reservation. At least in the movie his character is torn between two worlds. He can’t help but sympathize with his own people but also has a friendship with Senator Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn) and a romantic relationship with poet and future wife Elaine Goodale (Anna Paquin, who played Rogue in the X-Men films). By the end of the movie he has grown disgusted with health conditions on the reservation as well as the misguided aspects of the Dawes Act, which forced the Sioux to become farmers and also sell off more of their already shrunken lands. Eastman was not present for most of the events in the movie and certainly did not have as many personal interactions with other major characters, but he is used to show the tensions the Sioux face between preserving some of their culture and adopting the whites’ ways.
